‘Peak Hindutva?,’ in New Left Review, May/June (2024)
Abstract
On 4 June 2024, India emerged from the Modi miasma into which its corporate leaders had cast it. Bankrolling by ‘India, Inc.’ had created a mystique of invincibility around the Prime Minister. This was further inflated by India’s godi [lapdog] media, which parroted claims that Modi was the most popular leader in the world.1 Beloved of billionaires and Bollywood stars, yet pure and pious, never forgetting his modest origins, bringing happiness to the humblest homes, he had unleashed the animal spirits of the Indian economy, now set to overtake China’s as a world powerhouse, a high-tech and service-centre hub, while showering cooking-gas cylinders and flushable toilets upon the grateful poor. It could not last. The economic policy demanded—and received—by India, Inc. required imposing economic pain of a scale and severity that could not be electorally costless. The money- and media-driven inflation of the Modi cult could not defer payment forever and in 2024, votes finally dispelled the vapours money generated.